Ugly(131)

“Will you come with me?” I ask.

Max’s jaw twitches and I can tell he’s holding in a smile. “Oh yeah, I can come,” he says casually. I know he’s playing me and wants me to ask him again.

“You don’t have to. I can go on my own,” I tease him.

He leaps up off the sofa, and scoops me up hugging me tightly. “I’d love to go, Snowflake. Thank you for asking me.” His phone starts ringing, and he lets me go to get it. “Oh,” he says in a deeper tone as he looks at the phone. “I’ll be back in a moment.” He disappears down the hallway and closes the door.

I go to the kitchen and get a couple of bowls, and forks and spoons out, ready for dinner.

When I finish, Max emerges from where he was, looking quite distraught. “Are you okay?” I ask and go over to him.

“That was the private investigator. She’s on her way over. She says she’s got a packet for you to read.”

“A packet?”

“She didn’t sound great, Lily. Like something’s up. I called down to security and told them to send her up. She’ll be here soon.”

Suddenly my appetite disappears and I feel like I have fingers tightening around my throat, preventing me from breathing properly. “Okay,” I say to no question asked.

I go to sit on the sofa again, and stare out at nothing. No words, no pictures. Absolutely nothing is making sense.

“Lily, are you okay?” I shrug my shoulders slowly. I’m not sure. “She’ll be here soon.”

“Okay,” I say aimlessly.

“I can stay here while you open whatever she gives you, or I can leave.”

“No,” I say too enthusiastically. “I need you here. Please, don’t go.”

“Then I won’t.” He comforts me by sitting beside me and drawing me protectively into his side.

We don’t have to wait for long before the elevator doors open and a woman is standing inside his foyer. I take her in, and I’m surprised by her appearance. She’s wearing gothic clothes, has a lot of piercings on her face, and tattoos everywhere. We both get up, and walk over to her.

“Max, here you go.” She hands him a thick yellow envelope and she looks at me and smiles, “You’re really pretty,” she says. I’m not sure if she’s saying that to lessen the impact of what’s in the thick yellow envelope, or if she actually thinks I’m pretty.

I stare at the envelope, my eyes are fixated on it. I can feel my blood turning to ice as it rushes around my body, and my skin is covered in tiny goosebumps. Every hair on my body is standing at attention, and part of me wants to tear the envelope up and never look inside it.

“Thank you,” I finally manage to say, acknowledging her compliment. I hear Max thank her and the elevator ding, indicating she’s left. I’m not sure what will happen next, all I know is I’m being led by Max to sit on his sofa.

“Are you ready?” he asks. He places the innocent-looking, though I’m sure life-altering envelope down on the coffee table.

“I’m ready,” I whisper. I pull my shoulders back and sit tall. Max hands me the envelope, and I tear it open.

Sliding the stack of papers out, I flip through it and try to read as much as I can. But all I’m seeing is newspaper clippings, headings of “accident” and “overdose” and “family mourns”. There’s a lot of paper, but nothing makes sense.

I look up at Max, close my eyes and take several deep breaths. If I’m going to know, I need to begin at the start and go to the end. It’s the only way I’ll be able to understand.

“I’m ready,” I say aloud, maybe it was for Max’s benefit, or maybe for my own. Opening my eyes I look at the first piece of paper.

It’s a copy of my dad’s death certificate. He died from severe liver disease; caused by chronic alcohol abuse. Dad died four years ago. He didn’t show up to work for five days, and they went to his house to see what was happening. They found him decomposing in his favorite chair.

It goes on to show Dad’s employment record, his complete medical history, everything about Dad. Once I’ve sifted through many papers on Dad, all held together with a paperclip, I get to another stack of papers. This one is all about Mom.

Her coroner’s report shows she died from a massive overdose of sleeping pills. There were many drugs in her system, but the sleeping pills were essentially the cause of her death. And it was deemed ‘accidental’. The papers on my mom reached back to high school, it even showed Dad and Mom were high school sweethearts.

I keep flicking through her stack, and find she had a love for English like I do. She wanted to be an elementary school teacher and had completed two and a half years of college when she became pregnant with her first child, Lily Anderson – me.